Later that night, we sat in a hotel room watching TV, witnessing the world fall into more chaos. The Shadow Ka were increasing their area of terror, expanding now to the smaller cities and rural neighborhoods. The small port town we huddled in seemed okay still, although the people refused to venture out from their homes. The days were growing darker as the frightful shadow of the skies increased. The nights were even worse—moonless and empty. And I missed Rayna and Miyoko terribly.

When we returned to the hotel after our reunion, we'd found Joseph and Hood waiting for us, fretful and impatient. When the Shadow Ka version of my dad grabbed and pulled me into the Blackness, Hood had fallen to the wayside, forgotten in the confusion as the remnants of the chasing pack of Ka screamed their fury and left the area in a blizzard of black wings. Apparently they were not willing to get stuck in the Blackness again after waiting so long for the blocking I had invoked to finally end.

In the blistering instant when Dad and I had torn through the Black Curtain at the last moment, Hood had seen a blur of color, and then the Ripping had closed. With a heavy feeling of regret that we had not made it, he'd used the Bender Ring to return to the hotel where Joseph, Mom, and Rusty were staying, only to find Joseph as confused as he was.

But now we sat together again, our eyes glued to the increasing doom on the television. Only a couple of national news channels remained on the air—the rest having succumbed to the wave of coma-inducing Shadow Ka. The world was on the brink of some horrible thing that we did not fully understand.

We had no idea what had happened to the agents of the Secret Service, but we'd seen no sign of them, and they had never come after the rest of my family. Luckily, Joseph had gotten the new rooms under his name, and it looked like he wasn't yet important enough to be hunted by the United States government.

“My gosh,” Mom said, “what's going to happen now?”

“The whole world is in complete chaos!” Joseph said. “Jimmy, what's next?”

“I don't know,” was my very insufficient reply. “I have no idea. Somehow we have to figure out a few things.”

I told them everything I could remember, and showed them the Red Disk. About the cyclic riddle of how only Erifani Tup could show how to use the Disk, but you needed the Disk to find him. About how the Disk would then reveal the Dream Warden, and how he or she or it would then reveal the Fourth Gift.

The final Gift. Farmer had said it would be far more powerful than the Anything, which seemed so impossible. But I knew he was telling the truth.

Dad also told us his story of escape during that long, sleepless night.

Lost in a world of madness inside his own brain, which he refused to discuss any further, he'd slowly but surely felt his transformation into one of the Ka. Sometime after his wings had finally formed, he began to wake from the darkness, ready to serve his new masters.

But deep within, he held onto some semblance of himself, refusing to let the evil override him completely. Still on the fancy airplane where we'd last seen him, with the kind-of-human Raspy, they'd taken off to the skies, the old monster saying he wasn't taking any chances on recovering the Red Disk, and that they were going to retrieve it when we came back into the world up at the North Pole. Circling overhead, with an army of Shadow Ka surrounding them for support, they had waited. Hood had seen this but could do nothing.

When Dad overheard Raspy and some other person discussing how the waters of the Blackness destroyed the Shadow Ka, he knew it was his only chance to prevent himself from succumbing fully one day, and serving the Stompers.

So he'd reached down inside of himself and pulled everything good to the forefront, and in a furious burst of energy and will, he'd escaped, bursting through the airplane door, almost causing the thing to crash. He flew away with an army of Shadow Ka behind him. When he saw me standing there by the Ripping, his instincts took over and he grabbed my shirt to protect me from the Ka chasing him from behind, even though I would've been just fine because of the Gifts.

The rest I had witnessed first hand. Why he survived while the other Ka that fell in the water did not, remained a mystery. But we figured it had something to do with the good that still held tight inside my dad, despite his turning into a Shadow Ka. Perhaps the silvery sea cleans away all that is evil, and the rest of the Ka had nothing left after the process. We didn't know the answer for sure, and right then we didn't care.

After his story, there wasn't much talk. The next day would bring more troubles, more pain, more sorrow, more adventures, more confusion, more of everything that had come to define my life. But for the rest of that night, we tried our best to put it all aside, eat some decent food, and pretend like all was well. We were still on a high of having been reunited, but it was impossible to ignore what lay ahead.

Approaching midnight, we were almost ready to give up our forced happiness. Having decided to be extra safe and all sleep in the same room, no matter how crowded, we allowed ourselves to get some sleep.

That was when we heard the knock on the door.

When Joseph opened it, and we saw the person standing there, all symptoms of weariness evaporated like a rattlesnake teardrop in a mid-summer desert.

It was Tanaka.

But that wasn't the most shocking part.

It was what he held in his hands.